Month: December 2005

Music of Shakespeare’s Plays, New CD by Ensemble Chaconne:

Don’t know anything about it, but people were interested last time I had a story about the music of Shakespeare.

Among the many selections are “Willow, Willow” sung by Desdemona before her murder in Othello; “It Was a Lover and His Lass” (As You Like It); “O Mistress Mine” (Twelfth Night); “Hark, Hark! The Lark” (Cymbeline); “Take O Take Those Lips Away” (Measure for Measure); “Full Fathom Five” (The Tempest), “Go from My Window” from Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet; and “Greensleeves,” Shakespeare’s best-known ballad tune (quoted in The Merry Wives of Windsor), an allusion to women of ill repute, recognized by their green sleeves.
I’m curious about the Ophelia song. I wrote the beginning of a play once that I called “Ophelia’s Song”. The idea was that, like R&G Are Dead, it focused on the scenes between the scenes, what Ophelia was up to when she wasn’t on stage. The story was that she and Hamlet definitely had a relationship going, and he’d convinced her that he was just “playing” mad. I like that scene where she enters and gives the flowers to everybody. It might be the most tragic bit in the whole play, short of Hamlet’s final deathbed speech. Especially if there was a little more meat there to work with. Shakespeare didn’t really give her much depth.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

I stumbled upon ThinkExist today, so of course I punched up Shakespeare like I always do. I got a bunch of other people’s quotes talking about Shakespeare, which is actually kind of cool:

“If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded…, it was Shakespeare’s mind.”
– Virginia Woolf

“Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“If you locked Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough, eventually he’d write all the songs by the Monkees.”

“After God, Shakespeare has created most.”
– Alexandre Dumas Pere

“The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life : Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!”
– Robert Browning

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

Scene : Jack is over the apartment reading a script that Will has written. Jack has just discovered, to his shock, that “there are lezzies in this.”

Jack: Will, I beg of you, please let them be played by men. No one will know the difference. That’s what Shakespeare did when he had lesbos in his scripts.

Will: Yes, who could forget the coven of high school gym teachers in Macbeth?

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, television

So after finding that Shakespeare reference and being at google anyway I went looking for more Shakespeare Simpsons references. Ending up at www.simpsons.com I typed “shakespeare” into the search and, while I did not get any interesting hits, I did notice that the search engine is Prospero Technology.

That’s just weird.

Technorati Tags: television

Just caught a Simpsons Shakespeare reference I never noticed before. In “A Star is Burns”, where the town holds an indy film festival, Barney the town trunk creates his own ‘art’ film, in black and white, showing the horrors of life as an alcoholic.

He quotes a line from Othello “about a drinker” (and credits it as such): “To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast.” That is Cassio, Act II, scene 3.

…

I was just blogging that because it was a Simpsons reference. It only just dawned on me as I wrote it that IT’S OTHELLO AGAIN!

Man. Seriously. Othello week.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, television